It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for the first settlers around here. We're in-between country, with the harshly beautiful but obviously unfarmable Canadian Shield on our west and rich, flat, dull Laurentian bottomland on the east. It's not obvious that the soil isn't really very good, except in patches. Back 150 years ago, the surveyors marked it all off and settlers got their lots and went through the heartbreaking, horrendous labour of clearing the land. And they tried to farm it, and could just get by on it, but the farms didn't prosper, except for those few that happened to find pockets of good soil. No fault of the farmers, but nobody saw it that way.

The assumption was that if you worked hard enough, had enough courage, were strong, did your duty, didn't break under the load, then you would succeed. And, to a degree, the assumption was right --for the people clearing the rich Laurentian bottomlands. But farming mostly didn't work here because of the soil, not the ethic. Most of the old farms have been abandoned and have gone back to scrub timber, because God never meant this land to be farmed. That didn't stop people from making the assumption, though, and they cited the handful of successful farms as evidence.

And they also accepted the logical extension of the assumption: if you failed at farming, it must be because you didn't work hard enough, were a weakling, didn't do your duty, broke under the load. I still remember reading an academic analysis of why Irish settlers failed in Montague Township, which really is in the Canadian Shield; the academic historian who wrote it cited all sorts of cultural factors particular to the Irish, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to him to go out and look at the land itself. In Montague Township, what isn't rock is bog.

That hardscrabble ethic sank into the local culture, and in fact, it's extremely common. We judge others without mercy because we subject them to our own assumptions without looking at what they have to work with. Nor do we ask if our assumptions are, in fact, reasonable ones. I remember once being sternly informed by a severe young woman that the ONLY way to clean a kitchen floor was on hands and knees with a particular type of detergent, first pulling out the stove and fridge and meticulously cleaning underneath them, and anyone who operated differently was clearly All Wrong and Slovenly. She was an extreme example of a very common human phenomenon. We simply assume that people who don't meet our standards (the Only Reasonable Standards, of course!) must be weak and feckless, slackers, negligent in their duty. It doesn't occur to us to ask if our standards are, in fact, reasonable--any more than it occured to people judging the failed farms to ask if the land was suitable for farming.

It doesn't seem to occur to us, either, that it would be perfectly reasonable for others to turn around and judge us by their standards, which are the Only Reasonable Standards, of course! The hardscrabble culture could, of course, also be judged as inbred and culturally narrow and backward--but God forbid anyone should make those sorts of comparisions. The severe young woman disciplined her children in ways that could have got her in trouble with Children's Aid --but God forbid anyone should judge her maternal behaviour.

We have the "right", we think, to prophesy righteously for others, to tell them exactly what their sins are, because we know THE TRUTH--but God forbid anyone should look at us too closely. We're allowed to turn the kleiglights on others while protecting our own darkness from detailed examination. "I am brutally honest; you are unjustly critical; they are emotionally abusive."

The poor aren't all good, or all bad. People can be broken without being despicably weak--in fact, in some ways, the broken may be stronger and healthier than those who resist breaking with all their might. The race is not always to the swift, nor the contest to the strong. Gentleness is not always weakness, but sometimes a deeper form of strength. There's more, much more, to life than Duty, and our greater duty is to the soul's formation than to the correctly clean kitchen floor or the meticulously celebrated church service or perfect piece of dogma.

Of course the hardscrabble ethic stems from anger--a deep underlying harsh rage, unexamined and undigested and merely passed from one generation to another: "I have suffered, and I want others to suffer too so that I'm not alone in my suffering; I feel inadequate, so I will judge others as less than myself so that I'll feel better about my inadequacy." Such a sorry way to be....

The ethic also sees suffering as redemptive in and of itself: "I am good and noble because I suffer, and those who don't suffer are failures compared to me." But in fact, suffering doesn't redeem us; we redeem it, by turning it toward the Light and Love. If we worship suffering for itself, set it up as a god, then we're far more apt to fall into the Sin of Anger (and impose our cruelty on other people) than to find redemption. We're apt to set up hierarchies of suffering--a sort of Great Chain of Suffering, in which we're all glancing covertly around, trying to figure out where we are in the Suffering scheme of things, instead of simply facing whatever it is we have to face, and getting on with what has to be got on with, if that makes sense. We're also apt to impose quite unnecessary Suffering upon others for their own good, without much asking whether in fact it is for their own good, or for our own covert needs. Not good stuff.

Suffering is more or less inevitable in life, but it's not redemptive unless we allow God to make good use of it. We can, instead, revel in suffering, wallow in it out of vanity and self-righteousness, and that sort of suffering is anything but redemptive. As usual, it's like sex or nuclear power: it's not the thing in itself that's good or bad, but how we use it and what we let it make of us.

Suffering, properly used, may make us stronger, but it will also make us gentler--and while the hardscrabble ethic may judge gentleness as weakness or spiritual flabbiness, in fact that true gentleness, which is as wholesome and sweet as a good apple, is (to my mind) the mark of far deeper strength and of true maturity of faith. After all, Christ blessed the meek, not the rigidly righteous, in their resentment and self-importance. Blessed is that gentleness, for it redeems suffering and makes it God's own property.

The sorry thing about the hardscrabble farms isn't that they failed --they were foredoomed to do that--but that they left a sort of dour, judgmental, harsh, unforgiving taste to the local culture that took a long, long time to wear off. A gentler culture has grown up hereabouts, thank God, one that sees people in the fullness of their humanity, instead of in high-contrast simple black and white. The community has turned away toward a warmer, less judgmental ethic than the hardscrabble one. That's why I like the place.